We say as Paul that we are dead to sin and the law. Paul and we further say that grace now reigns through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. It is at this point that we hear from a multitude of sources that to assert that we are dead to the law leads to a licentious lifestyle. Many a grace preacher then counters this accusation by saying that God’s magnificent love and His grace will motivate the believer not to be attracted to sin, that grace will overcome any evil impulses. However, this is not an adequate explanation to why we never again will return to a sinful lifestyle.

When posed the question “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?” Paul counters: “By no means!” He then continues with this truth: Don’t you know that you were baptized to His death and raised with Him to newness of life? To further drive home his point he utilizes three analogies.

He compares our human condition to that of a slave. We are either slaves of sin or slaves of righteousness. There is no intermediate state. When we were slaves of sin we were driven by Satan and his lusts. We carried his fruit. Fruit we now are ashamed of. Paul uses the analogy of a vessel to accentuate his point. Man is a vessel which either contains sin or righteousness, either Satan or God. The main consequence of the fall was that we were deceived (Rev 12:9) to believe that we have a human self which can operate and maintain itself. The deception leads to ideas which maintain that when we receive the proper impulses we will be motivated to do right.

Next Paul applies the tree analogy. We are branches either engrafted to the tree of knowledge of good and evil or the tree of life. The sap which flows through the branches decides which fruit are produced. On account of that we have changed trees the fruit we now produce are the fruit of the Spirit. We never produced fruit without a tree! Hence Paul so emphatically states: “By no means!”

His last illustration is that of a husband and wife. He speaks about the law of marriage. The wife is legally bound to her husband as long as he lives. She receives his seed and produces children with his stamp and his attributes. Any change of husband would be adultery, and our problem is that he never seems to die. The solution is that the wife dies in Christ. Raised with Him she is now free to marry another, and she now receives her new husband’s seed and produces His children or fruit. Jesus came as a representative of the whole human family and dissolved that marriage to sin-Satan which was consummated at the Fall. Paul’s point is that we always have produced fruit of a husband.

How can we continue to produce sin when we are married to righteousness, when we have changed trees and are sold as slaves to a new owner? That is an impossibility, Paul insists. That deity which produced sin in us is forever removed from our lives! That connection is severed! It was in us, but now Christ is in us. We irrevocably produce His fruit. Paul’s “By no means” can only be wholly appreciated when we recognize through faith and the inner witness that we do not have an independent self. We manifest the deity to which we belong.

Paul’s motivation to write these chapters evidently is to establish the converts in Rome in their new identity, to comfort those precious souls in those afflictions, temptations and weaknesses we all face. It is as he says: “Don’t let appearances decide how you perceive yourself. You belong to God and Christ lives in you.” In Romans 7:4 he states that since we have died to the law we now bear fruit for God. Paul further writes: “For apart from the law, sin lies dead.” There is nothing wrong with the law, but that old master seized an opportunity through the law and deceived us into believing that we were independent selves who could keep the law. To our great dismay and despair we discovered through the law that we were sold to sin. In other words God used the law to disclose that deception that we are independent selves who can operate and manage our own lives.

What Paul so clearly proves is that we never are those in-between persons who have to choose between good and evil where all the emphasis is on us and our ability to make the right choices. This is another one of those lies the law exposes. It is the deceiver projecting himself as you when you are captured in that mindset.

It is on this backdrop that we refuse to let any outer ordinances, shoulds, ought tos or similar commandments have any influence on our lives. We are driven by another who is our law. His life in us is grace!

What comes out of all this is a beautiful humanity created in God’s likeness to be Christ expressers. There is nothing wrong with us. Paul clearly identifies the power which wrought all kinds of evil in him as sin. It wasn’t him. He was merely expressing the deity which formerly indwelt him. Before Christ he expressed that deity. In Christ that same deity upholds the illusion that he is an independent self and thus can keep the law. However, since he is not an independent agent he fails miserably. He has to learn that he is Christ in his form. When he fails the false deity upholds the illusion that Paul is an independent self and thus that there is something wrong with him and it even convinces him that it still is in him. But that is just another lie. Christ is the new indweller, who through Paul’s negatives awakens Paul to Himself.

When Paul finally come to terms with the amazing truth and behold his perfect humanity and that he now is a Christ-expresser he triumphantly cries: There is no condemnation in Christ Jesus!!!

I found this sentence arresting: “Many a grace preacher then counters this accusation by saying that God’s magnificent love and His grace will motivate the believer not to be attracted to sin, that grace will overcome any evil impulses. ”

Right to the heart, Ole Henrik! Only getting to this bottom place, recognizing what we were and who had captured us, sets the full stage in our consciousness to realize, out of that negative, Who we are now. Once slaves, expressors, manifestors, deceived and blinded by Satan so that we were made fools in opposing our own selves (2 Tim 2:25), from this bottom place ([Eph 4:9-10] ” … what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? — we are found by Him at the very bottom of all things — so that then, “He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens, that he might fill all things.” Now, where has this occurred? Macrocosmically, it is universal, but microcosmically, it is deeply personal and and it has all been transacted in the inner depths of our spirits, from the birth of Christ in us, on through to the Cross, Resurrrection and Ascension! Whatever all that means in the world “out there,” it is first my inner totality, that as Christ descended in death to the fiery depths of existence, and captured death and everything it held, all of this in you and in me, we descend also, we know the heat also, we experience the futility and void of the infinite black hole of self-for-me which can never be satisfied in anything it can create for itself or imagine itself into. It is grace and mercy to be given this place. It is grace and mercy to be taken down to nothing. It is grace and mercy that every human means of rescue is exhausted. Because right there in that darkest darkness where, like they say of the depths of the ocean, light does not penetrate and only void prevails. This is it, the bitter end, the total bottom, the final destruction of this monster that has attached itself to us all our lives, keeping us bound in fear and false self-importance. It is burned up in the fire of hell coming out of the “consuming fire” of God, and there Jesus the Lion of the Tribe of Judah penetrates farther than light can go, because Love is greater than Light, and can go further and penetrate where light cannot. So in the heart of the black-hole of deepest darkness, which has grabbed the race of men since the beginning, LOVE goes and snatches death away. Love penetrates evil where it is said God cannot look. And that Love brings us out. We despaired even of our own lives, but by mercy and grace, the Living Love grabs us and starts the ascent. We have resurrected and been born anew from above. But that is not the final destination. The final destination for us all is the Ascension, and our consciousness makes that move as the Spirit opens up the Way (“walk ye in it”) every moment. Christ takes us the whole way He went inside ourselves, because He is the forerunner, and in identification and union with Christ and all He was, IS, said or did, our lives become “to live is Christ.” We experience death to its fullness. We learn resurrection as the Spirit teaches us Who we are in every moment and in every circumstance, and then finally we know His authority as One sitting at the right side of the Father and in the midst of the Throne a Lamb that had been slain, with us there with Him decreeing the decrees of the Most High.

When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, he told his assistants to “take off the grave clothes”. Why? Because Lazarus wasn’t dead any more! Now, we have gone from death to life, and this new creation made righteous in Christ is dead to sin- the capital Sin, the devil, has been cut off permanently! And we cannot have two natures, either, no tug-of-war of ownership; we have become fixed in our faith, and it is now God who holds on to us, not the other way around. When we become Christ-centered in the New Life, we start to realize that it has less to do with us and more to do with Him being able to complete the work He has begun in us- such is our confidence in Christ Jesus.AMEN

We Live in Romans 8

To put it briefly, Romans 7 is not the chapter in which the believer lives. We live indwelt By Christ in Romans 8. Romans 7 is when we forget that Christ lives in us, and we try to live – to fulfill the law – by our own strength. But independent self is sin, therefore the moment we forget the indwelling Christ, and try to live by independent self, sin is at work in us, and we are under its dominion. Therefore the point to remember is that as that chapter tells us, we are dead to the law; that means we are not independent people trying to fulfill God’s law. We are new people, with the Law-Giver living in us, Christ Himself. We only enter the bondage of Romans 7, when we forget that fact and we must learn to turn quickly by the cleansing blood to our abiding place in Romans 8.
(Norman Grubb)

Norman Grubb

Unforced rhythms of grace

"Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly."
(Matt 11:28-30, The Message)